


Wipe You Clean With Dirty Hands

by depressaria



Category: The Strain (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Community: tic_tac_woe, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-20
Updated: 2019-07-20
Packaged: 2020-07-09 11:48:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,720
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19887187
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/depressaria/pseuds/depressaria
Summary: It was like slipping into an alternate universe where everything was exactly the same as in the last one, except shittier. Like spilling water on a box of puzzle pieces and then trying to fit the water damaged pieces together. It mostly worked if you forced it. But you never had to before.Early Season 3 AU. The Master is successfully killed, but his death doesn’t cause the death of all strigoi. Instead, all existing strigoi become unable to pass on the contagion. The survivors begin the arduous task of taking back their world from an enemy that’s still deadly despite no longer being able to replenish its numbers. When Dutch dies during what was supposed to be a routine mission, Eph and Fet’s relationship becomes more complicated.





	Wipe You Clean With Dirty Hands

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the wild card square on my tic_tac_woe bingo card. I chose “mass infertility/underpopulation.” An attempt at creative prompt interpretation? It’s imperfect but I have other ideas for this show (and my bingo card) that I want to work on.
> 
> Title from Spanish Sahara by Foals. 
> 
> Warnings: Character death (Dutch), canon character death (Kelly, Zach), fairly canon typical violence/gore, past Fet/Dutch, Eph/Dutch, Eph/Kelly, Eph/Nora

It had been supposed to fix things, to take out all the strigoi and get what was left of his family back in one fell swoop. It wouldn’t matter that he’d gone behind Fet and Setrakian’s back to get the Lumen, that he’d used Nora’s death to do it, because no harm, no foul, right? The Master would be dead, all the strigoi gone, Setrakian’s mission complete at last. There’d be too much going on—good and bad, though the good of ending the apocalypse outweighed a lot of bad—to worry about how they’d gotten there. 

Except the Master’s body was lying there on the ground between them, the stink of ammonia (which had been overpowering beforehand) rapidly growing unbearable. Nothing had changed except that their best hope was gone, his son was probably lost forever, and Fet and Setrakian’s faces were cycling slowly through shock and then relief and then disappointment and then disgust. All he’d succeeded in doing was alienating the two people left in the world who might have otherwise been on his side. Who might have known what it was like to live in a world without Nora. 

It didn’t make sense. 

Of course, the idea that all victims of a plague would die or become noninfectious because you killed patient zero also didn’t make much sense. 

Maybe it was better not to think too hard about any of it.

~*~*~*~*~

What mainly happened was that he felt like an asshole, and then desperately wanted to blame someone other than himself for feeling like an asshole, and since Dutch had neatly cartwheeled away from the fallout like she’d been in the exact same situation a dozen times before—which, to be fair, she probably had—the only person left to blame was Fet. Which didn’t make him feel too bad because it wasn’t like Fet was just off being quietly hurt by what had happened. No, he was stomping around, making shitty, obnoxious little comments, pushing himself into situations that absolutely did not require his presence just because he wanted everyone to know how very martyred it was. It was bullshit and they both knew it was bullshit, just like Kelly had known about Nora long before anything actually happened.

But Hell, maybe it was actually healthy. Maybe it was easier to squabble with each other than it was to fully deal with everything they’d lost, or to cope with the reality that they might spend years working to put the world right and even then it might never be fully the same.

Still, it pissed him right the fuck off when Fet insinuated himself into the testing of Dutch’s adaptation of the strigoi signal jammer, which was some neat device that they’d be able to use to set up ambushes or even a more defensible perimeter. Quinlan could have done it faster, except he was already gone on the mission Fet was supposed to have gone on that night, so Eph wasted a half hour or so arguing with him about it, until finally Dutch ran out of patience and said she’d just go out and plant the damn things, and that was one crisis solved for the night. 

Except she stopped answering comms. 

It didn’t take long to find her. She hadn’t been far from Fet’s apartment when they got her. There were no strigoi around, but that didn’t mean much; it could have either been a group that targeted her and left, or a few stragglers who ran off after the next meal as soon as she was—

It wasn’t a comfort that she wouldn’t turn. 

Because it wasn’t supposed to be like this. They were supposed to be in the easy part. The part where they innovated because it would get the job faster and not because if they didn’t innovate they’d die. They were supposed to be in the clear—hell, it was supposed to almost be fun. There were probably a lot of twenty-something dudes over the fucking moon because they were getting to live out their zombie apocalypse fantasies without any real danger to mankind.

But she was still dead. Just gone. No last words, no one there with her when she went. The same thing had happened to people all over the city, was—now that he thought about it—probably still happening even though the real danger had passed. 

What he thought was _this is my goddamn fault._ If they hadn’t been arguing, if he’d paid more attention, if one of them had gone with her, if… 

What he said was, “This is your goddamn fault.” 

Because that was what she’d have wanted. Another fucking pissing match over her rapidly cooling corpse. 

~*~*~*~*~

Even though they were nearly certain that the strigoi all lacked worms, they still burned the bodies. Feraldo’s orders. Setrakian would probably have wanted to do it regardless, and Eph probably would have agreed with him. There were no guarantees with a plague. The moment when you got complacent was the moment you stuck yourself with a dirty needle. 

It still felt wrong to dump Dutch—Dutch’s _body_ , he kept telling himself, there was no one home anymore, not even the contagion—on the pyre. 

Eph and Fet were halfway through a bottle of brandy before her ashes had begun to cool. 

“This is pathetic,” Eph said. His voice came out more strained than he would have liked. 

Fet finished refilling his shot glass and slid the bottle back over to Eph. “Agreed.” 

“Some fucking eulogy.” 

“Don’t.”

“She wasn’t like Quinlan or Setrakian. She didn’t care about going down in flames or nobly sacrificing herself for the cause. She wanted to _survive._ She—“

“I said don’t.” 

“So how do we decide which one of us is allowed to mourn?” Eph went on, not even bothering to try and keep the bitterness out of his voice. “Do we go based on who had her first, or who had her most recently? Because my first instinct is to argue that sticking your dick in another woman sends a pretty clear message about your feelings for your ex. But you did see her first.” 

He’d been expecting the blow, but it still came as a surprise when Fet’s fist collided with the side of his jaw. It knocked him off the barstool and onto the floor, which made all the liquor in his stomach churn ominously, which made him press the back of his hand to his mouth and close his eyes against the way the world was tilting queasily. 

God, when had everything gotten so fucked up? If someone had told him that night at the gas station that this is where he’d end up, he wouldn’t have believed it. Hell, it was hard to believe _now_ that he’d once been so… optimistic? But it wasn’t even really that. What he’d really been was entitled and full of shit. Fucking idiot with absurd fantasies of winning back his estranged wife while somehow not alienating his coworker/fuckbuddy/girlfriend, of curing a brand new disease and stopping a pandemic in its tracks. Sharing a goddamn Nobel prize with Nora. Now he’d be lucky if Kelly didn’t kill him and Zach, if Zach even wanted to see him again after everything they’d been through. If _he_ even wanted to see Zach again knowing he’d left Nora to die. If Zach was even still human, if Kelly hadn’t turned him right before the Master died and she lost the ability to. 

Everything he touched turned to shit. 

When his stomach reluctantly settled and he opened his eyes, Fet was still there, sitting on the ground like a drunk college girl too far gone to trust herself to stand, holding the bottle of brandy loosely in one hand and regarding him with something closer to pity than hate. 

“I deserved that,” Eph offered. 

“So did I,” Fet said, and held out the bottle. 

~*~*~*~*~

The next morning found them both passed out on the floor of Fet’s place, in yet-to-be-determined states of hungoverness. They’d apparently fallen asleep sitting up, knees almost touching, the bottle of brandy overturned and mostly spilled between them. 

For a minute the impulse the draw a dick on Fet’s forehead before he woke up almost made him forget that Dutch was gone. Along with everyone else he’d ever cared about, with the apparent exceptions of a geriatric pawn broker, a half-strigoi with no idea what to do with himself now that he’d killed his dad, and an asshole exterminator. When he reached out to grab the bottle of brandy, it was half to stave off the hangover and half to stave off the ghosts. 

Fet started stirring before the dick-drawing impulse had solidified into a dick-drawing plan, and started scrabbling weakly for the brandy before so much as making eye contact with Eph.

“Beat you to it,” Eph said, raising the bottle as if toasting champagne at a charity dinner before taking an unnecessarily long drink. 

Fet swiped for the bottle and missed. “That’d be the first time,” he said, and the thing was that both of them expected for it to hurt. But somehow instead of bitter it came out dryly sentimental, like they’d spent the past weeks becoming friends instead of letting their initial kneejerk dislike fester into something more virulent. It didn’t come out nasty, not to Eph or to Dutch or even to Fet himself. It just… was. 

So instead of relinquishing the bottle when Fet made another grab for it, Eph leaned further away with it, and when Fet kept reaching Eph kept leaning long past the point when two very hungover men should trust themselves to lean or reach, until they ended up tangled up in each other, half bickering with each other to just stop, you’re a CDC official not a toddler, oh my God you’re being such a dick, and half laughing like drunk college girls feeling each other up during a sorority initiation—much as it pained him to bring up that comparison twice in twenty-four hours. 

Then Fet’s hands ended up wrapped around Eph’s wrists. They were warm and solid and Eph suddenly felt stone cold sober. He’d ended up like this with Nora too many times not to realize what it looked like. Hell, they were both too old to not realize what it looked like. 

God, he could still feel Nora. The soft weight of her thighs, the way her hair would fall down around them, shielding them (if only temporarily) from the rest of the world. Dutch, with her bony legs and often stringy hair, gave no such succor, but they hadn’t asked that of each other. And Kelly—

If it were anyone but Fet their clothes would already be off. Except maybe Setrakian. _Maybe._ As it was they both seemed paralyzed by the closeness, hyperaware of each breath and each heartbeat, unable to stomach holding still but not bold or stupid enough to pull away or move closer. 

“I’m wondering how she’d feel about this,” Fet said hoarsely, normally easy smile fading too quickly. 

“She was always going on about that polyamory crap,” Eph said. Not that it was really crap; she was probably onto something, even if it didn’t apply to everyone. God knows that if there’d been a way to have both Kelly and Nora he’d have jumped on it; he had no room to begrudge her wanting Nikki and Fet and Eph all at once. 

“It’d either be like Christmas for her or like the whole world was ending. Again.” 

The floor was starting to be hell on his back so he shifted, just a little. Except he mostly just managed to succeed in letting his leg brush against Fet’s hip. Fet drew almost imperceptibly closer, seemingly involuntarily, like a flower following the sun. Or a strigoi worm drawn to a bleeding wound. He tried to pretend that he didn’t notice. Cleared his throat, which was pretty much a dead giveaway that he had fucking noticed. “I don’t want to, uh. Do something we’ll regret. Not regretting that it happened, but regretting because we realize later that it’s…”

“Disrespectful to her memory?”

“Yeah.” But even as he said it he felt himself leaning into him as much as he could with his wrists still pinned and his ass slowly going numb against the concrete, drawn almost magnetically to Fet’s slightly-open mouth, unable to break eye contact. If they were any closer he’d be getting macro footage of Fet’s pupils dilating. 

He didn’t know which one of them finally made the move, just that one minute the agonizing tension seemed doomed to go on forever, and the next minute Fet’s mouth was on his, hot and soft and needful, and for a little while that was all that either of them needed.

~*~*~*~*~

Toiletries had understandably become something of an afterthought in the wake of the apocalypse. You used whatever happened to be in your current hideout’s bathroom when everything went to shit. In their case it was whatever had been in Fet’s bathroom when everything went to shit. Their entire group had showered there at some point, using his shampoo and toothpaste with varying levels of embarrassment. Setrakian had seemed unruffled, seemingly used to giving up the luxury of his own space for the sake of the cause. Nora had been self-conscious and overly polite, using as little as she could get away with. Dutch had made a big production about spending as long as she pleased in the bathroom, but she ended up taking shorter showers than any of the guys did sometimes, even if she ran the water so hot that five minutes was enough to thoroughly fog the mirror and billow out when she exited the bathroom like their lives had turned into an 80s comedy film instead of horror. Eph had actually pissed in the shower once, which was probably a dick move, but he’d been pissed off at Fet for some petty reason and at the time it had seemed vital to mark his territory somehow. Even if it wasn’t actually his territory.

Dutch wore borrowed belongings with the slightly self-conscious defiance of someone stealing a shirt or underwear from a one night stand. They were more her own than her own belongings, because they were proof of something real, even if the something real was just a vampire apocalypse. Couldn’t imagine what shampoo she had at her own apartment, whether it was something floral her neurotic girlfriend bought at Lush or something common and boring like vanilla or something stupid like Old Spice that she’d bought as a joke. The sharp rosemary-and-tea-tree smell of Fet’s shampoo was Dutch as much as the taste of alcohol in her mouth or the iron of the blood under her nails. 

The end result was that what he remembered of Dutch’s scent was her shampoo, and since her shampoo (or at least, her shampoo when they had been sleeping together) was Fet’s shampoo, Fet smelled like Dutch. 

He recognized that really it was the opposite, that Fet had possessed the scent long before Dutch swaggered into either of their lives. He also recognized that if he was going to get all sappy about something as stupid as a shared shampoo he’d have to apply it to everyone else who’d showered there, but Setrakian always smelled like old books and home cooking or old books and blood depending on where he’d been most recently, and Nora had always smelled unusually neutral (habit left over from clinicals in med school), except for sometimes faint whiffs of antiseptic. So he let himself have it. Let himself pretend, if only for brief moments, that something more significant had passed through the three of them than death and convenience. 

“Rosemary was one of the herbs used in four thieves’ vinegar,” Eph said, lifting himself up onto the counter. “They thought it would protect them from Black Death.” 

“Did it work?”

“Some of the herbs were mild flea repellants, but probably not strong enough to do anything. Of course, they probably didn’t even realize they were flea repellants. They were just trying to drown out the stench because they thought it was spread by smelling sick people. So on that front it was a resounding failure.” 

“I did study history, doc.” 

“Sorry. Force of habit.” 

“Yeah. Always in dad mode.”

“Can we not talk about your daddy issues when I’m wearing your clothes?”

Fet’s gaze flickered over, then, as if he hadn’t noticed before that Eph had raided his wardrobe. Which might have been for the best, because that would mean that Fet hadn’t noticed that Eph had been wearing pretty much the same thing since he and Quinlan stole the Lumen, which he figured most people would agree was a bit gross even in the apocalypse. 

“Fair enough,” Fet said, easily enough, but something sat uncomfortably heavy between them as they sat at the table sipping coffee and pushing scrambled eggs around on their plates. Eph felt suddenly self-conscious where he hadn’t before. He wasn’t exactly swimming in Fet’s clothes, but he was suddenly hyperaware of what size difference there was between them. Didn’t help that they’d both lost weight since the world ended; what would have been a comfortably loose shirt was now bordering on baggy, and he’d had to tighten his belt past the couple of notches he’d been meaning to slim down past since Zach was still in preschool. He took an uncomfortable swig of his coffee and tried not to watch Fet trying not to watch him. Tried not to be entranced by—fuck, it was stupid—the way his hand held the fork (completely different from the way it held a weapon) or the way he picked up the coffee cup. Tried not to think of how if he kissed him now he’d taste of coffee instead of alcohol.

This was going to end bloody.

~*~*~*~*~

They had to regroup at the Mayfair when Fet’s apartment ended up overrun. 

Not while they were in it, but they’d come back after patrol to find it fucking crawling with strigoi and the bottom had fallen out of his stomach when he’d seen it. Had kept falling when Fet’s hand came to rest on his shoulder and slid down to clasp his own hand. 

_You’re not horrible,_ Kelly had said. _Just barely present._

Christ, was that what he was doing? Was it what he had been doing this whole time? Just moving parasitically from one empty relationship to another, using genuinely caring people to make himself feel whole for awhile before discarding them once the newness wore off or they started asking for reciprocity or they just ran out of love to give? He’d driven away Kelly, used Nora to convince himself that he could really care about someone, then alienated her, too. Had slept with Leigh because he felt trapped and powerless and thought that if she was attached to him she’d be more proactive in pushing the plague through. Slept with Dutch because he was lonely and hurting. Slept with Fet because he was grieving a life he’d never appreciated and a woman neither of them had really known. 

Kelly ended up turned, Leigh was killed because he put her in danger, Nora was killed because she was looking after Zach for him. The only one who hadn’t been killed as a direct result of him was Dutch, and even then it was arguable. Maybe if he hadn’t been in the picture she and Fet would have gotten back together, and then… something. They could have left town together, or maybe Fet would have been able to save her because he would have known that something was going to happen to her that night in the way that people are always supposed to Know when their wife or son or sibling or parent is in danger or sick or dead. He hadn’t had the faintest idea of it when Kelly was turned, or when Zach was taken. At least, nothing beyond the low-level sense of impending doom that had been circling him ever since he saw Setrakian release the Arnots. 

Barely present. 

Whatever the reason, Fet had felt something real for Dutch. Maybe it was realer than what she’d felt for him. Eph didn’t know. What he did know was that it was realer than what he’d felt for Dutch, and what Dutch had felt for him. Not that he hadn’t cared about her—God, far from it—or that she didn’t care about him, but they both went into it knowing that it was about… convenience. Except not as heartless as that made it sound. They both needed someone and happened to be in the right place and right mindset at the right time. Dutch knew that. He knew that. The question was whether Fet knew it now.

Or maybe the question was whether it was true now. But he’d been to enough marriage counseling sessions to know that if he was navelgazing over whether or not he was being a selfish ass and hurting someone, then he probably was. Fet acted like nothing ever got to him, but once he let someone in they were in, and if they did something to betray that trust it cut him deep. 

Hell, at least Dutch had felt something real for Nikki. Maybe Fet and Eph were just a way to numb herself, but she’d really cared about Nikki. Anyone could see that. All Eph had was the stupid, animal love that every parent, no matter how shitty, has for their kid. Even the most awful parents couldn’t escape that chemical need to protect, even if they twisted it around and forgot about who they were really supposed to be protecting. It didn’t redeem him. It didn’t erase that all he’d been doing since college was use people. 

What was he going to do if Fet ended up the way Nora and Dutch did? Move on to Setrakian?

He was too wired to sleep so after Fet fell asleep he slipped out of the bed—trying not to think about how the last couple to share it probably ended up turned when shit first hit the fan—and got dressed. 

When he looked up from closing the door to Fet’s room, Quinlan was at the end of the hallway, watching with apparent impassivity. For a fleeting instant he found himself contemplating the florid hollow of his throat, wondering if it would be as fever-hot as a full strigoi’s, wondering how he would react if Eph crossed the distance between them and kissed him. If the presumable thousand years of blue balls would have made his mouth pliant or indurate. 

There was something seriously fucking wrong with him. 

Not the wanting to french the monster part—though that was something he was going to have to unpack at some point—but the part where as soon as he found something halfway decent in the dumpster fire of his life, he felt compelled to wreck it. Stronger than the urge to drink, because at least that disease process was a well-documented and long-studied one. This was something else. 

~*~*~*~*~

Shit hit the fan again when they were clearing out an apartment building for Feraldo. 

Barely five minutes into their exploration of the infested building, three things happened in rapid succession. First, his foot went through one of the ammonia-drenched floorboards in the lobby. Second, his pocket tore open against the jagged wood, sending his only silver grenade rolling down into the basement. The third thing was that it went off, filling the gloom of the basement with plumes of silver dust, and before he had time to be grateful that he’d thought to bring the new prototype that was meant to be nearly silent, the rest of the floor gave way and he went plummeting with it. 

It took him longer than it should have to get his bearings back. The basement was full of strigoi, though none in the immediate vicinity of where he’d fallen. Maybe they’d weakened the floorboards on purpose as a kind of trap. That didn’t really matter at the moment. What mattered was that there were at least twelve that he could see, and while it was still early enough in the day that they were sleeping too hard for the initial blast to snap them all awake and none of the silver dust (some of which was still drifting gently down around him) had fallen on them, some of them were starting to stir. There’d been too much noise for them to not be stirring. And the jammer—the device Dutch had worked so hard on—was in pieces, just so much junk adding to the pile of rubble he was on.

And what was perhaps of more pressing importance was the fact that when he fell, something must have sliced his leg open, because blood was starting to soak through his jeans, even if the pain had yet to make an appearance. Must have hit his head or something, too, because it was pounding and his stomach was threatening to capsize. 

He didn’t remember that he hadn’t been alone until the beam of a flashlight caught his attention and he looked up to see Fet peering over the edge of the sizable crater that used to be the floor. 

“I’m okay,” he called, figuring that the sound was less likely to wake the strigoi than the smell of his blood. “I just cut the shit out of my leg.” 

“Can you make it to the stairs?” Fet asked. 

Even if he could, it’d be pointless if the basement door was barricaded, but trying was better than sitting there waiting to bleed out or get stung. As quietly as he could, he pushed himself to his feet, but the pain finally made an appearance as soon as he put weight on his injured leg, and even with one hand pressed to it he could feel blood oozing out alarmingly fast. 

“ _Doc_ ,” Fet said slowly and slightly too loudly, as if he’d been trying to catch the attention of a slightly senile old man for the past five minutes and had had to repeat himself half a dozen times already. When Eph finally looked back up at him, he said, “Just sit back down, okay? Get your gun out. I’m going to try to get into the stairwell.” 

“Yeah,” Eph said. “Yeah, okay, I can do that.” He could, right? He sat down hard, the motion only technically not a fall because it’d been what he intended to do. One of the strigoi jerked and growled softly in its sleep.

“Keep pressure on that leg.”

At some point he’d somehow forgotten about the importance of that. Surely he hadn’t yet lost enough blood to cause confusion; if it was that bad, he’d be dead already. Fet waited until Eph was holding his gun in one hand and pressing his jacket to his leg with the other before disappearing from the edge of the hole in the floor, and then everything was quiet except for the increasingly distant sound of footsteps and the soft rattling sounds the strigoi made in their sleep. 

Somehow the smell of them was the worst part, the ammonia stench of their waste lying heavy on the air that seemed all the heavier when surrounded by the awful fever-heat strigoi generated. Any other disease that gave the patient a fever that high would cause irreparable brain damage within hours and death soon after, but maybe that was what really did them in, not the worms colonizing them or the stinger bloating up and destroying the vascularity to all their other organs, but just the fever burning them up until all that was left was the basic essence of them, something frail that The Master could control more easily than he could control the soup of hormones that normally piloted a human body. Kelly wandering around New York with worms behind her eyes, losing more and more of herself until finally all that was left was her love for Zach. If it happened to him and it _couldn’t_ but the second you were too certain was when you got a needlestick injury, Nora had stuck herself once when they’d been working with a novel flu strain and it was a needle that she hadn’t used yet, it was just that the cap had been stuck and she’d pulled too hard so when it finally came loose she was jabbed with a clean needle, but God what if? And if it happened to him there wouldn’t be anything left.

The world lurched and he puked and when his stomach finished heaving up every drop of the coffee he’d had before heading out the door that morning, he saw that one of the strigoi had woken up. Which was one way to clear his head, he guessed.

It seemed almost surprised, hunched into a defensive posture as if it was surrounded by twelve navy seals and not one of a dozen hungry animals surrounding a single bleeding, possibly concussed human. 

Okay, _probably_ concussed. 

But the strigoi were too stupid now for what little survival instinct they had to hold them back for long. Already a few others were waking up, chittering in what he could only assume was excitement. Like the way tree frogs started trilling after a storm. It was noon; it’d be six hours at least since they last ate, assuming they’d managed to feed that night. 

The most alert one clambered forward on all fours, chittering and staring at the blood seeping through the jacket pressed to his leg. When its hand touched pile of rubble from the floor it squealed and recoiled, hand smoking. 

Eph tightened his grip on the gun. If he shot it, the others would wake up. On the other hand, its struggles would wake the other ones up eventually anyways, and then he wouldn’t have the luxury of being able to pick them off one by one. He couldn’t reload the gun one-handed and somehow he doubted that he’d be very functional anyways if he let his leg bleed freely. The silver dust that had settled on the rubble and on his hair and clothing would provide some protection, but there were a dozen of them and it wouldn’t hold all of them off forever. 

A large thump from the top of the stairwell made Eph jump and the strigoi go still, watching the stairwell with the focus of a dog sighting a rabbit. Another two opened their eyes and got up, but they barely spared a glance for the actual source of the sound, zeroing in on the nearest food source. 

Another thump. The good news is that it was probably Fet. The bad news was that the door to the stairwell wasn’t budging, which meant that getting through it was going to take time they didn’t have and make noise they couldn’t afford to make. 

Two more strigoi joined the group trying to puzzle out how to get through the silver dust and towards their next meal. One opened its mouth and engaged its stinger almost hesitantly. He wasn’t in a position to dodge, but it didn’t matter. Before he could even raise his gun the strigoi was shrieking in pain, the side of its stinger having glanced off his leg and been burnt by the silver dust coating his jeans. Another, apparently emboldened, went for his neck. He fired that time, and the shot went wide, but the strigoi’s stinger went wide too. 

Belatedly, he realized that he was holding the gun with both hands. 

He just needed space. Time to think. To—be present. He pushed himself back until his back was pressed against the wall, then made himself put pressure on his leg again. It felt exhausting and pointless. Just painful for no real reason. If he was staunching the flow of blood at all it was barely noticeable; he could feel blood oozing out between his fingers and streaming down his wrist, soaking the sleeve of his shirt and running down his arm. 

All the strigoi were awake now, roused by the scent of blood and the sound of the gun and the banging on the basement door. He shot at them again, but the gun was slippery with blood and his arm was shaking and all he managed to do was nick one of them in the arm. Which was worse than not firing at all because now he was down one bullet and there were still twelve of them. 

Fuck. 

One of the strigoi, moving delicately enough that if he didn’t know any better he’d think they were starting to get their intelligence back, crept forward on all fours, placing its hands on areas of the rubble where the coating of silver was thinnest and barely even croaking when its hands started smoking. Its mouth fell open, stinger beginning to protrude, and as he shakily aimed the gun an awful creeping sense of dread settled hard in the pit of his stomach. It wasn’t just a shitty situation. He felt suddenly certain that he was going to die. At least he couldn’t get infected.

Except then he pulled the trigger and the strigoi actually collapsed, setting the rest of them to chittering furiously and pacing more restlessly. 

Something hit the ground hard, but his ears were ringing and he couldn’t tell which direction it’d come from. 

“Fet?” he tried. His voice came out watery and pathetic and he never figured he’d be able to hate himself this much when he’d lost enough blood to keep Quinlan in business for a month but there you go. 

But the strigoi had stopped advancing, their vocalizations slowed to quiet, frustrated croaking, and his stomach turned over so violently that if he’d had anything left in his stomach and his body didn’t feel almost too leaden to breathe let alone vomit, he might have puked again. 

There must have been another entrance. Maybe it’d been a trap for them after all, or—

It didn’t really matter, because it wasn’t Fet who’d made it into the basement. It was Kelly.


End file.
